Latest Posts
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Wet-into-Wet Watercolour: Painting by Sections
This is a followup to my previous post, about Gail Speckman’s first approach to Wet-Into-Wet Watercolour, painting on fully saturated paper. Today I will try her second approach, which involves prewetting the paper section by section, and then dropping colour into these sections. When I read this, I felt an immediate sense of recognition. This…
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I finally get some perspective, part 1
I never learned how to draw linear perspective. I didn’t really notice the lack of it while learning to paint nature scenes, but urban sketching – drawing buildings and streets from life – really makes it obvious that I don’t know how lines work. So! I decided to try to learn, and to take you…
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Is Inktober for me?
October’s coming up, and once again, I need to decide whether to do Inktober. For the uninitiated, Inktober is a popular ink drawing challenge started by animator Jake Parker in 2009, initially as a self-challenge to improve his own inking skills. It took off in a big way on social media (I credit the extremely…
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Dark Glows: Reading Jeanne Dobie’s “Making Color Sing”, Chapter 7
I am back on solid ground with Chapter 7 of Making Color Sing, “Dark Glows,” which concerns mixing your own dark colors. As with mixing your own grays in “Mouse Power,” Dobie advocates mixing blacks that aren’t quite neutral, but lean toward one hue or another. Then, by laying them next to light-valued colors in…
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Mix Your Own: Moonglow
Daniel Smith’s Moonglow is a mix of three pigments: (Da Vinci’s Artemis uses the same pigment combination.) In this post, I will not actually be making a close match, for a few reasons: Why Moonglow? What I like and don’t like What I don’t like about Moonglow: What I do like about Moonglow: Surely, that…
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Wet-into-Wet Watercolour: Working on Saturated Paper
In spring, I decided that this would be the summer when I learn to do wet-in-wet properly. I am finally attempting to do so, using Gail Speckmann’s “Wet-into-wet Watercolour”.
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Gotta pick a purple or two
I love purple paintings. I feel like I like my work in direct proportion to how much purple there is in it. Yet, I also claim not to keep a purple on my palette because “it’s easy to mix.” Then I find my paintings often don’t have enough purple in them. Where’s the logic in…
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Why does everyone insist dull greens are “more natural”?
Here in Boston in mid-September, it is late summer, cusp of fall. The days are getting shorter and cooler, and the trees are starting to look less bold green and more brownish. I finally understand what people mean when they say you need to add red to foliage greens to make them look more “natural.”…
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Push-Pull and Turn: Reading Jeanne Dobie’s “Making Color Sing”, chapter 6
Last time I was all excited because I understood the chapter that had lost me the first time around. Well, it’s the very next chapter and she has lost me again. This chapter is about light and shadow, and is getting into some theory about which I know very little.
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Color Theory 101
If I’m going to criticize other peoples’ color theory summaries, I figure it’s only fair for me to offer my own.
